Posts Tagged ‘Harris Interactive’

Harris Interactive just released their annual RQ (reputation quotient) survey among the U.S. public.  This is year 12 for the Harris RQ – that’s a long time and underscores the value that this kind of research brings.  Harris conducts the survey among  consumers on what they call the most visible companies in the US along with others that represent major industries. The study starts by asking people to nominate or name the companies that stand out as having the best and worst reputations overall.  The most nominated companies form the core group asked about. For this reason, one usually finds that those companies that have been in the headlines for reputational scandals are measured.  Besides the usual ranking of who’s on first and who’s struck out, Harris identifies several trends: 

• Among their “elite” reputation winners (i.e. most highly regarded), two reputation drivers stand out – “looks like a company that has high ethical standards” and “tends to outperform its competitors.” Again, this underscores the importance of speaking up and being an industry leader.
• How companies communicate also drives reputation according to Harris – communicating Sincerely, Accurately and Consistently correlates highly with positive reputation. Transparency and empathy count.
• An additional theme that Harris highlights is that those companies that “support the infrastrucuture” of Americans’ lives at work and at home also drives positive corporate perceptions.  This means that companies that help people get their jobs done easily at home and at work tend to be esteemed.  Interesting notion.
• All the major industry sectors saw year over year reputation improvements — particularly automotive.

Of course, there are always clouds and rays of light in any silver lining. And here it is….66% say that the reputation of corporate America is not good but there’s hope for improvement. This figure has not moved much from the 65% who said the same thing last year. So I’d say a solid thumbs down with cautious optimism. However, 22% say the reputation of corporate America is good with room for improvement (up four percentage points from last year).  Not so terrible. A miniscule 1% says corporate America’s reputation is great and can’t get any better (same as last year).  I sure would like to find out more about them to see what they are thinking or or if they are living in the clouds! Thankfully only 12% of the American public say corporate America’s reputation is terrible and there is little that can be done about it.  That’s pretty definitive. So all in all, hope is alive for corporate America and for those of us in the reputation management arena, it is in our hands.

I’ve been very busy so have not had a chance to mention two studies related to reputation that are worth reviewing.

The first one is about industry reputation which continues to intrigue me. The Harris Interactive Poll found that the most credible industries among 2,152 adult Americans are supermarkets, hospitals, banks and electric and gas utilities. They have been doing this research since 2003. Not too surprisingly but disturbing nevertheless was that when asked this question about 17 industries, a large 48% said “none of these” industries are trustworthy. This was the highest number of people saying this since 2003.  Overall, no one industry is doing particularly well and this speaks to the overall downturn in perceptions of business over the decade.

The second survey that should be on your radar is research by Nora Ganim Barnes. She has been diligently surveying Fortune 500 companies with regard to their social media usage.  Social reputation is a growing component of reputation which is why I am writing about this. This is the third survey that she has done on this topic at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Here are some of her key findings for 2010 (conducted in August/September 2010) which are great to track over time.

1. One quarter (23%) of Fortune 500 companies have a public-facing corporate blog with a recent post over the past 12 months. Two years ago, only 16% had blogs so this is a healthy increase.

2.  When it comes to industries, the industries with the most blogs are computer software, peripherals and office equipment. This includes companies such as HP, Microsoft, Apple. There have been increases in blogs in the specialty retail industry (Best Buy as an example) and telecommunications as well (Verizon, AT&T).

3. About one third (32%) of top 100 ranked Fortune 500 companies had a blog, a slight dip from 38% in 2008. 

4. A whopping 90% of  Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions. That is good news to see that these blogs are interactive and not one-way.

5.  They looked at corporate Twitter accounts (had to have tweeted in the past 30 days) and 60% had Twitter accounts, a jump up from 35% in 2009. Nine of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies had accounts and consistently posted.  Specialty retail companies were the most likely to have Twitter accounts. Since they are so consumer-facing, makes sense.

6. A fairly large 56% of the Fortune 500 companies are on Facebook. Not bad but not up to the level it should be and will be over time.

Industry reputations are still failing but social media seems to be exploding (Twitter and Facebook) among the top companies in the US.  We are witnessing the Great American Reach Out. Industry reputations could begin the climb upwards if there was greater adoption of interactivity. No doubt industries will take this seriously and jump onboard. CEOs as well will become more socialized in the years ahead.

       Industry reputation is critical to companies today. It is many times more important than it used to be. Years ago, one company could have its reputation damaged and it did not tarnish the reputation of its peers. Today, one rotten apple affects the entire industry which is why we now hear so much about sectors when it comes to reputation – the financial sector, the pharmaceutical sector, the oil sector, the automotive sector, etc.  The media frequently reports on various industry associations banding together to promote their reputations. Industry reputations rise and fall but whatever problems they may have, the reputation after shocks for industries seem to linger for a long time. Whereas individual companies can repair their reputation in due course, it often seems harder for industry reputations to do the same. Weber Shandwick asked this question of executives a few years ago in our Safeguarding Reputation research and found that executives the world over consider industry reputation much harder to manage than company reputation (57% vs. 39%).

Harris Interactive’s latest research on reputation among consumers asked about sector reputation.  The greatest year over year reputation improvements were seen in the retail and the automotive industries.  Of 13 industries studied, only the pharmaceutical industry declined from 2008 to 2009. The financial services sector which is often in the headlines increased which I found interesting.  Perhaps the recovery is lifting perceptions of that industry and people believe that reform and stablility is finally on its way. Maybe they feel that there have been enough apologies and it is time to move on. Hard to know without asking.

Annual RQ 2009 USA, April 2010

When it comes to overall corporate reputation, consumers are not as negative as they were one year ago, according to Harris Interactive’s research. In 2009, 81% said today’s reputation of corporate America was not good or terrible. This compares favorably to 2008 when 88% said so. Still the figures are damming.  Harris Interactive reports that the increase in perceptions of good corporate reputations in the U.S. is the first increase in four years. We will take whatever we can get.  Let the “good” times roll.

   Over the past few weeks, there have been several reputation rankings released. I am stunned by the proliferation of rankings on reputation. It is getting harder to keep track of whose ranking is whose and what’s behind the numbers. Whereas there used to only be one or two major reputation rankings, today there are scores. We (my team at Weber Shandwick) knows because we keep track of them every day in our database called Scoreboxx.  We must have over 700 primetime corporate rankings that companies can compete on and receive recognition.  These rankings fall into broad categories such as corporate responsibility, workplace, diversity, leadership, etc.  Years ago, a company only had to worry about Fortune’s Most Admired Companies survey. Now you have to be on the alert for lists that give you a thumbs up or thumbs down.

In the past few weeks, we have seen the release of Harris Interactive’s Reputation Quotient,  Reputation Institute’s  Pulse Survey and  Millward Brown’s  Global Brands (BrandZ).  All good and “reputable”  lists. However, they are all coming out at about the same time and comingling in people’s minds.  Years ago when I was at Fortune, we conducted a landmark survey about business readership of business magazines. A few years later, Forbes conducted their  own readership survey of business magazines with a twist that confused the marketplace. The two surveys were similar but because many people still confused Fortune and Forbes, Fortune’s competitive advantage was weakened.  

My reputation advocate friend Joy Sever is right when she says that all these lists are diluting one another because most people do not understand the differences between them and how the data are gathered.  She was right to also say that pretty soon it will all be about the reputation of the reputation rankings. It seems like that has already begun.

The most important way to measure reputation is to take these reputation rankings into account but focus primarily on your own customized research that drills down into your most important stakeholders’ perceptions and most critical reputation dimensions. By tracking your own company reputation vs. competitors over time, reputation-building has its best shot.